Is the Next
Step a United States
of Europe?
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON--"Some frontiers are only in
the imagination" wrote Jan Morris in her "Fifty Years of
Europe". Prince Metternich used to say the frontier of Asia
was at the Landstrasse, the street which ran towards Hungary
away from Vienna's city walls. It is also said that Konrad
Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany after World
War 2, held similar feelings about Prussia. He was a
Rhinelander, and whenever his train crossed the Elbe, on its
way eastward to Berlin, he too would groan, "Hier beginnt
Asia", and pull the blinds down. After last week-end's
momentous event, the launching of the single currency, the
Europeans now have to consider where they go next. Do they
in fact need frontiers within Europe any more? If they can
come this far, shouldn't they let their imaginations work
further and complete the journey to a United States of
Europe?
By any measure of history the European
monetary union is a milestone. Those who try to put it into
perspective by comparing it with the long forgotten monetary
union of Charlemagne, The Holy Roman Emperor or, in more
recent years, the failed shilling that linked Kenya,
Tanganyika and Uganda miss the point. This single currency
of western Europe is not only a more sophisticated concept,
resting on the most rigorous monetary discipline that has
taken years to perfect, it is part and parcel of a union,
that like no other in history, has voluntarily wedded a
majority of the world's most developed economies which, if
they had chosen, would have continued reasonably well as
independent economic entities.
The reason they chose not to is
essentially idealistic and visionary. Of course, economic
union, starting with a custom union for iron and steel in
the 1950s and maturing today into a single currency zone
does have economic benefits- we know that from the stunning
twentieth century success of the greatest continental
economy of them all, the USA. But on its own, long-term,
economic self-interest was never enough to drive Europe's
horses through and over the forest of hedgerows and fences
that lay in their path. It was to end war, to remove the
causes of belligerency and to create institutions that would
further the development of democracy, to push forward the
supremacy of human rights law out of the reach of the
meddling of the politicians and bureaucrats. So what next?
The question will not disappear simply because the process
of the change-over of currencies is fairly complex and will
take a few years to resolve. Nor because the issue of
British, Swedish, Danish and Greek entry still has to be
sorted out. Nor because western Europe has promised to bring
in eastern Europe, starting in 2003, which should have been
the priority all along rather than expanding NATO. Nor,
even, because the new Europe has to realize that it has to
bite the bullet on Turkish entry, a necessary Muslim
counterweight to the monolithic Christian culture of
Europe.
If America could be united why not
Europe? European public opinion, still very nationalistic
and anti a federal Europe, is generally ignorant of how
American federalism came about. Very few are aware that
starting from the Declaration of Independence it took nearly
90 years to establish a fully mature common currency. Even
then the federal reserve system didn't come into being until
1913. (The European Union has travelled the same course in
just over 40 years. ) As with Europe today the fledgling
republic used currency to help unify the country. In the
middle of the Civil War the National Currency Act of 1863,
providing for the replacement of state bank notes with the
universal greenback, helped pull the divided country
together.
No one more personifies the quest for
a united Europe than Chancellor Helmut Kohl. In the push for
the single currency he has not had the majority of the
German people behind him. Nor did he have the Bundesbank.
But two weeks ago the German parliament gave the go-ahead
with an overwhelming majority. Scarred by a brother dying in
combat in World War 2 and by his own teen-age years as a
conscript he has nurtured and brought to fruition a dream
that most of Europe's sophisticated commentators at one time
or another, have misinterpreted, maligned or, too casually,
derided.
Indeed, Kohl has had to temper his
vision to accommodate this hostility. In recent years he has
played down political union. A "United States of Europe" no
longer appears in his speeches. Nevertheless, it's fair to
assume this quiet approach has been merely a tactic for
Kohl. A call for a federal Europe is bound to resurface,
especially if he wins the German general election in
September. If he loses, as is currently predicted, the flame
will have to be passed to newer hands which may be no bad
thing, as the idea needs to be translated from the older
generation's quite necessary obsession with avoiding another
pan-European war to one where the growing might of European
economic institutions is subject to democratic
audit.
As the single currency becomes
ingrained in everyday habits a united Europe will seem a
more natural evolution to public opinion than it appears
today. It may take another quarter of a century to realize
but it is probably inevitable that the frontiers of Europe
which are set to become more and more "only in the
imagination" will begin to disintegrate.
May 6, 1998,
LONDON
Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172; fax
+44 374 590493;
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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